Having mucked things up last week over the Labor government’s agreement with Gina Rinehart’s Hancock ­Prospecting to bring in 1700 foreign workers to help build its $9.5 billion Roy Hill iron ore project, Prime Minister Julia Gillard should have moved quickly to correct her mistakes. But she has instead, like on so many occasions in the past, allowed the shemozzle to continue.

Resources companies still don’t know what the new rules governing enterprise migration agreements (EMAs) will be. It’s also still unclear whether the online “jobs board” that Ms Gillard has agreed to set up to advertise explicitly for Australian workers is just political window dressing or yet another layer of costly red tape.

Labor doesn’t get much right these days, but the Roy Hill EMA announced last Friday was good policy. Resources companies are finding it hard to secure workers to construct and run the massive development projects being built across northern Australia to meet China’s insatiable demand for our minerals and energy. New research prepared for the Minerals Council of Australia, and reported in today’s newspaper, shows those problems are being compounded by rising costs.

But instead of selling the benefits that will flow from the Roy Hill project – such as the creation of close to 7000 jobs for Australian workers – Ms Gillard botched things up. After initially claiming she wasn’t properly briefed on the Roy Hill deal, the Prime Minister has spent the past few days indulging union demands for more controls over the EMA process.

Rather than providing the strong leadership required to manage our resources boom, Ms Gillard seems to be increasingly hostage to unions and the Labor caucus.

It is unclear how many hoops mining companies will have to jump through in terms of scouring the land for workers prepared to take up jobs in the Pilbara, the Bowen Basin and other parts of northern Australia. It now seems that new EMAs will have to run the gauntlet of a caucus sub-committee, most probably representing labour monopolies that will have direct input into the process and possibly access to the commercial details of resources company investment proposals.

Ms Gillard’s minority government appears to be increasingly prepared to change the rules and is beholden to gusts of political interest and internal Labor machinations.